The Making of You Is in Their Scorn

There is an Akan proverb: aboa a onni dua no, Nyame na ɔpra ne ho — the animal with no tail, God swats the flies for it. It is a proverb about the disadvantaged, about people who have been dealt a hand that leaves them exposed. But it also carries a quieter lesson: the tailless animal does not spend its life mourning the tail it doesn't have. It gets on with grazing, and lets God handle the flies.

I think of that proverb whenever I meet someone nursing a wound inflicted by another person's scorn.

It is genuinely painful to be scorned — by an individual, a family, or a society that has already decided what you are worth before you've had the chance to show them. The instinct, when this happens, is to absorb the pain, replay the insult, and let it sit in your chest like a stone. But there is a better use for that stone. Pick it up, and build something with it.

Retaliate by rising. Not with words, not with confrontation, but with results. Work and improve your status. Turn your situation around so decisively that the insult becomes irrelevant, a footnote in a story that ended well. Engage with people who can genuinely move your life forward, even in small ways — a mentor, a client, a pastor, a partner. Productive engagement, however modest, has a way of quietly dissolving worry that no amount of brooding ever will.

Change your atmosphere. Not necessarily your address — your atmosphere is both physical and spiritual, the air you keep choosing to breathe. A wrong atmosphere is loud with distraction: gossip, comparison, people who specialise in noticing what's wrong with you. You can build your own atmosphere without moving a single box. Read books that stretch you. For the Christian, fill your ears with music that draws your mind back to God rather than music that keeps you circling the wound. Over time, and almost without noticing, your life begins to change shape around what you've been feeding it.

Here is the part people resist hearing: you may actually need that difficult person.

Not because their intentions were good — often they weren't. But intentions and outcomes are two different things, and what someone means for harm, a determined and God-focused person can turn into fuel. The alternative to being provoked is comfort, and comfort, left unchallenged, rarely produces growth. It is uncomfortable people who dislodge us from the plateau we'd otherwise have stayed on indefinitely. Without that shove, many of us would still be exactly where we were five years ago — safe, unbothered, and stagnant.

So don't fix your eyes on the person who scorned you. Fix them on the version of your life that would make the scorn impossible to repeat. That shift — from why is this happening to me to what am I going to do about it — is the whole difference between being a victim of the moment and being the author of what comes next.

And here is the part that will surprise no one who has lived long enough: once your life actually changes, respect follows it home. Often from the very people who withheld it first. Not because they've suddenly grown kinder, but because results have a way of rewriting people's memory of how they always "believed in you."

Let them scorn you, then. Let it sting for a moment, if it must. Then get up, change your atmosphere, do the work, and cast your mind on God while you do it. You may find, in hindsight, that the very person who tried to write you off was the push you needed to finally begin.

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Author: Felix Ekow Eshun

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